The Public We Need
The Public We Need
It is hard to call people into a political project that is deeply incompatible with their sense of what it means to act morally in the world.
Working on the foreign policy advisory group for the Bernie Sanders primary campaign in 2019 and 2020 changed the way that I process and think about politics. I saw up close the challenges that candidates face in channeling popular frustrations and demonstrating that they have the ability to address them. They have to bring together multiple majorities: in primaries, the general election, and Congress. They have to create the public that they need, though of course they do not do so under conditions of their own choosing.
By 2024, it was clear that President Joe Biden had lost the ability generate the support he would need to win. Kamala Harris’s campaign began well, under the circumstances. Millions of people were willing to work for and with her. She focused on the right places. In Wisconsin, where I live, our house was canvassed while we were out canvassing, and a steady parade of politicians representing different wings of the party showed up for rally after rally. But the small lead that she attained slipped away. It may be impossible to say whether a different approach would have won, but I want to highlight two problems that interfered with the work of constituting a public.
Several of the election responses in this issue discuss the need for a popular economic program. Here, there is a painful reality. The Biden administration’s policies prioritized supporting workers and resulted in an economy with a very low rate of unemployment that produced real wage gains for working people, reduced inequality, and took a few steps forward on the path toward a Green New Deal. None of this helped the Democrats electorally. Biden’s inability to communicate his accomplishments and Harris’s “opportunity economy” pablum are part of the picture. So, too, was inflation.
But while core inflation was brought down to normal levels without triggering a recession, housing costs remain extraordinarily high. Soaring rents and home prices strain budgets and make economic security feel out of reach for millions of Americans. They are causing homelessness and out-migration, notably in places governed by Democrats. A special section of this issue is devoted to housing, highlighting important organizing successes at the local level, where much of our work may be restricted to in the years to come. The articles also communicate the urgency of adopting an all-of-the-above strategy on the left, welcoming new building from both private and public sectors without imagining that construction alone will solve the housing crisis.
If Harris could not quite call forth the public she needed around an economic program, neither could she do so in the realm of foreign policy. The Biden administration’s strategy after Hamas’s murderous attacks on October 7 was to embrace Benjamin Netanyahu in hopes of having some control over the conduct of Israel’s wars. This approach failed both morally and politically. Maintaining the strategy required the Biden administration to slow-roll investigations into abuses and war crimes that would have triggered U.S. laws that prevent weapons transfers to governments engaging in gross abuses of human rights. It rendered Palestinian pain, suffering, and death politically invisible—emblematically in the refusal to allow a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention—because that pain implicated the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza have been subject to forced removal, starvation, and death, making the United States an accessory to genocide, as Amnesty International has exhaustively documented.
Donald Trump, unconscionably, was able to present himself as the peace candidate in this election. Trump’s version of “peace” is one that offers a green light for violence and annexation by the authoritarian leaders he admires. But it was impossible for Harris to claim the high ground given her unwillingness to publicly break with any aspect of Biden’s approach. Many in the Democratic coalition suppressed these concerns during the campaign, hoping that they could push for change after victory. But it is hard to call people into a political project that is deeply incompatible with their sense of what it means to act morally in the world.
Much of the conversation after Harris’s loss has been framed around the question of whether the Democratic Party was too close to the center or too far to the left. But this question doesn’t really get at what matters. You have to be able to bind people’s political participation to the goal of solving the problems they encounter, and both the center and the left have areas where they struggle to do this. For the rebuilding ahead, we on the left must make our ideas as strong and as smart as they can be so that our movements can be those things too. In this issue and in those to come, Dissent will be laying out a vision of a better country and how to get there. When the time comes for reconstruction, we have to be able to call forth the public that we will need.
Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.
